Apocalypso - Softcover

Cumming, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 190015238X ISBN 13: 9781900152389

Publisher: Stride Publications, 1999

Synopsis

Poetry. Angela Topping's carefully crafted poetry probes love, death, parenthood and the intricacies of relationships. She exposes human frailty in her unpacking of family history, the suppressed eroticism of forbidden love and the magic of the everyday. Her wit is metaphysical in its playfulness and she slyly makes us laugh at ourselves. She uses familiar figures such as Peter Pan and Frankenstein's monster to comment on marriage and parenthood, using imagery which is often both deeply sensuous and startlingly original. Angela Topping writes in a very sharp, clear voice that never minces words and makes you see the wider significance of a seemingly minor event. This book shows a strong awareness of craft and a dlightful use of words -- City Life.

About this title

Review

Tim Cumming is a young English poet who has long shown a gift for the surreal, incisive, amusing one- liner. Plenty of poems in Apocalypso confirm this talent. Try "A woman gave birth to a pair of white socks" from "Deja Voodoo". Or "Butter was another indulgence / He'd even considered children once" from "Butter". Or even the wonderfully Cumming-esque: "When you see me coming / your mouth swings open like a gate / and your future flashes ahead of you / like a runaway bus on a motorway", from "Specks".

But that's not the whole of it. What this collection also confirms is that Cumming has achieved a new and invigorating maturity: These one- liners knit together to make satisfying poems, the poems are beaded cleverly together to make one of the best new books of verse published this year. Cumming's tone is pretty regular: coolly sensuous and wryly melancholy. The subject matter, though, is splendidly diverse and ranges from the fertile weirdness of outer London, to the poignant ordinariness of the commuting life, to the lyrical sadness of a love affair going wrong on holiday. "We've been travelling for years, now / we have reached the frontier ... Radios can't be tuned here. No news returns to the centre". ("The Last Town"). If one were to criticise one might argue that a little metrical variation, perhaps even the odd rhyme, might have helped to enliven the slight monotone of voice, but that is a minor, personal quibble; this is an impressive collection from a significant and highly talented poet. --Sean Thomas

Synopsis

Apocalypso is a world inhabited by the perpetually disappointed, for whom nothing is as promised, nothing turns out as hoped. Through the urban detritus tramp a procession of the alienated and estranged, their lives summed up by useless objects.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stride Publications
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 190015238X
• ISBN 13: 9781900152389
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 75